The Human Body Is So Resilient, It Always Surprises Me

Whenever I think about how I treat my body and how much I have put it through, I'm always amazed by how it just bounces back if I give it just a teeny bit of loving care. I just love being in my body so much as I see its strength and resilience. What about you? Are you as surprised by your body as I am?

Transcript

Hello everyone,

Welcome to another episode on the podcast or the video wherever you're listening to me.

My name is Boomshakha and in this one I wanted to speak to you about how amazed I am,

How flabbergasted I should say I am about the resilient power of the human body to bounce back from all of the things that we do to it.

And actually really truly speaking about myself I don't know how other people live and I don't know what other people do although I've seen the ravages of other people's lives and how they treat themselves poorly but particularly I'm just gonna speak about myself because I am an expert on the way I live my life.

And even though I try as much as possible to eat healthy,

I don't manage to do it completely but I do try,

And even though I try to get my eight or nine,

Eight,

I should say eight hours,

Seven to eight hours of sleep every night,

I don't manage every single day but I do try as much as possible and you know even though I try to get a little bit of movement and in every single day at least an hour or so of movement,

A little bit of walking,

A little bit of yoga,

I don't do it every single day but I try as much as possible.

So you know I try to do all these little things in order to ensure that my body is as much as possible,

Not close to its peak,

I wouldn't say that I'm as ambitious that but healthy enough that I can sustain myself,

I can have a lot of energy to do the work that I want to do,

I can be as creative as I want without worrying about anything like that and hopefully the desire is to be as mobile and as healthy as possible into my 80s and hopefully even until I die and so I do all these little things of course in order to make sure that I am healthy and I stay healthy but I do know that there are a lot of things that I do wrongly that I'm addicted to that I can't stop doing and that is detrimental to my health and one of them definitely,

Definitely,

Definitely has to be my screen addiction and I really want to do this video because recently I've started getting regular massages,

I'm living in Bali right now and it's very easy,

Very cheap to get massages here,

You can get an hour-long massage for I would say like seven or eight dollars and it's a really good massage and it's extremely powerful,

It's a Balinese massage that I get but what I'm really noticing from these massages is that they really go deep into my muscles and into my tendons and ligaments and they poke at every little bit of my body which means that I can really feel which parts of my body are extremely tense and have a lot of knots in them and of course it's kind of interesting to me because you know as I'm sitting here and I'm just being myself,

Chilling out or I'm just walking through the world,

Mostly my body's adjusted itself automatically so that I don't notice these little cricks and these pains and these tension balls in my body,

My body kind of adapts to it so I don't notice it,

It's not even visible to me,

It's not even,

It's not perceptible to me at all because it's just my body's adjusting but it's fascinating because as soon as my masseuse starts pressing on all these little different parts of my body,

All of a sudden I realize that first of all I have a really tense body filled with lots of little knots but I also realize how these interesting parts of my body that I never realized were tense are actually tense so I'll give you a few examples of course because I was so fascinated by it myself and I would hope that you would get a massage or you would do a self massage and try to figure this out for yourself you know what parts of your body are actually extremely tense without your knowledge.

Now so of course a major part of my body that I was surprised that is really tense is around my knees and behind my knees and the side of my knees and I can actually really feel it even now I'm kind of pressing on my knee I could feel the sides are a little bit tense now I started thinking about it why would this part of my body be tense I don't run I walk a little bit I do yoga I mean it doesn't make any sense until I realized that I sit at a desk and my knee is literally in that in that position all day long while I sit on that chair and so perhaps that's why it's a little bit a lot tense when my masseuse presses on it that was one spot that I was really surprised by and then another spot that really surprised me was here the back of my arm here there are a cluster of nerves and veins and tendons and ligaments kind of that kind of attached themselves to the back here and you can't actually see it but it's like right here and and if you were listening to this I'm sorry but you won't be able to see it it's basically behind my shoulder but at that point where my armpit starts and even now and I'm pressing it I could feel that it's extremely tense there I was really surprised by that I mean I I mean I would imagine calves I would be imagining quadriceps you know I'm imagining my hamstrings are tight and tense yeah sure they are but really this spot I was really surprised by and I never knew and then I asked someone about it and they're like yeah it's because there's a lot of a lot of different tendons and ligaments and muscles that kind of attached there and of course there it creates a lot of tension so that was really fascinating to me and of course you know a typical spots like I do a lot of computer work so my wrist around my wrist sides of my wrist are really really painful I can really feel it even now it's so painful and then my screen addiction oh my god my screen addiction and so I'm on my phone and I you know I'm like kind of holding my phone and I'm kind of like moving my thumb a lot and so this part in between the thumb and the first finger this the soft bit if you press down on it you'll notice it is extremely tense for me I can really feel this muscle has really been through a lot it is terrible and it's literally this right hand because I don't use my left hand that much it's a little bit tense in my left but not so much and so you know that's another spot that I was really surprised by I would have never imagined it was only because she kind of pressed on it and she does that every single time and you know I'm always like well what is that spot why is it so painful and I started kind of doing you know self massaging like just to make sure that I'm not I only go once a week so I I know that probably there's a lot of tension that accumulates during the week and so sometimes I'll give myself a massage and I'll notice wow I'm so tense in between my thumb and my index finger and so that spot is extremely painful and I have to work on it a lot another spot that I was really really surprised extremely surprised by was actually my belly and I don't know about you but I really have to take a lot of these deep breaths throughout the day because I noticed that I hold a lot of tension in my belly and even now I can feel like it's extremely tense and I really have to massage it out and actually again as I said take a lot of these long long breaths where you know the exhale is longer than the inhale and that releases a lot of tension for my belly just one of these breaths and I can already feel myself relaxing a lot a lot so again that was another spot that I did not realize I was holding so much tension a couple of spots I knew I was holding a lot of tension and that's the reason I go to get a massage is my shoulders of course I as you can see they are extremely extremely tight my trap muscles are so so tense they're much better now because I get a lot of massages because they really they really stamp down on it but I do notice that my my shoulders are extremely tense of course it's because of all the computer work that I do also I don't have the best posture so that's not good and then another one actually I should say which kind of surprised me but shouldn't have surprised me was my glutes my glutes were so tight and then I started thinking about it again I think has to do the fact that I sit a lot and as in general as humanity we sit a lot you know we're sitting on our desks all day long and then we're sitting on the couches all day long and then we sit we sleep on we sit and sleep on our beds all night long and so I noticed that my glutes are extremely tight and so I really had to you like really get deep into it I got a massage ball and I really started massaging it deep because it was very painful but again as I said you know our bodies are so resilient because I know that if I didn't massage my body as often as I do and I wouldn't have noticed all these spots perhaps over time I would have gotten an injury because my muscles would be so tight or you know I would have gotten like a repetitive strain injury because I was using my wrists or my fingers to type all the time on my shoulders would get I would get frozen shoulder or something because of the fact that I'm hunching over all the time on my computer so over time perhaps over years I would have gotten some kind of injury because my body be like hey I can't take this anymore I cannot do it I need I can't balance you out anymore because you're doing too much so I am sorry but we're gonna have to do some we're gonna have to take some drastic measures like getting injured or sending you a lot of pain signals in order for you to make some changes but it still it takes a long time for the human body to get there you know until that point you're functioning fine you're moving around you're doing your thing and all of a sudden you get injured but it's not all of a sudden really because unless it's something that you know is all of a sudden where you kind of got hit by a bat or something but really these repetitive strain injuries are these frozen frozen shoulders they don't happen just from one day to the next your body really adapted itself and and took care of you and balanced itself out so that you wouldn't notice all of these imperfections or imbalances in your body and I kind of did it for years on end before it was like all right I can't do this anymore it's too much and then I need to get I need to you know do something drastic but it really does you know it really does surprise me how resilient the body is and how much it can kind of take how much abuse how much abuse our human bodies our bodies can take before it can't take anymore and really it is it's very it's fascinating to me because I really think that if we just spent a little bit more time taking care of ourselves we would be we'd be fine because we really literally don't take care of ourselves at all and that's why we're dealing with all these issues that we deal with if we just paid a little bit more attention to the way we sat the way we moved the baby ate you know the way we lived our lives just a little bit more attention and we you know made the changes necessary our bodies wouldn't need to send all these drastic signals to us to say hey I'm in trouble you're in trouble let's do something about it instead you know we'll just ignore as typical humans do we just ignore things pretend like everything's fine until it's too late so I just wanted to do this video because I really thought I thought it was fascinating how my body had all these spots that I wouldn't even realize I'm sitting here right now and I have no idea that my knees are tense but if I touch it I can tell if I press down on the side of my knees I can feel oh yeah there is a tension spot there and same thing with the rest of the parts that I mentioned so I hope that you will hopefully if you can't get a massage you know and conscious do a little bit of self massage you know it's very easy to like press on your body you know kind of hold your body and see where is it tense where does it feel like it needs a little bit of loving care and then give yourself a massage get some massage oil and do it for yourself it doesn't necessarily mean that you need to go to a masseuse I'm sure your body will really appreciate a little bit of massage a self massage for you from your loving hands I hope this helps I hope that you were able to gain something from this episode and I am extremely grateful for your support your love over the years over the months I shall see you in the next one bye for now

Reviews

This one is going in a few of my playlists. 🙂 I have a connective tissue disorder (genetic) which causes my tendons and ligaments to be easily injured and they don't "snap back" when they do heal, which js often twice as long as it would take for others. Consequently, my muscles do a lot of the joint support work - which they were NOT designed to do - and I often have knots forming, subluxation, restriction of movement from muscle cramps and spasms, and so on. I wish I could afford weekly massages, but I do get biweekly medical massages from my chiropractors office (no cracking, he uses an activator and gentle manual pressure to put the joints back in place), which smooths out the knots but we're careful not to relax the muscles so much that they cause the joints to not have the necessary support. When one of the massage tgerapists had just started, she was still learning what the right amount of pressure was for me. After seeing her and my chiropractor to make sure I was lined up again for the next ew weeks, I realized I felt really relaxed. I thought it was just a new person with a new technique. Nope. My chiropractor watched out the window as I left, went down the few steps to tge sidewalk, then opened the door and told me to come back inside because going down those four steps was enough to undo the pelvic upslip correction he had done. He adjusted it again and we actually had an ice pack on the area to tighten up the muscles a bit again for stability. I've done physical therapy for the glutes, shoulder, neck, knees, almost every body part, it seems, and I do my own at home trigger point therapy, exercises, body mechanics/posture work, use a sit stand desk with an under desk elliptical when I have to sit, all sorts of things.

Now, there are many people my age with this condition who are in wheelchairs or braces much of the day (I brace when necessary and joke I need a separate closet for my collection of braces for different body parts). I am medical retiring from my job at the end of this month because the long commute, even with orthopedic pillows, is just not physically possible for much longer. Like you, I want to remain active and mobile as much as I can until the day I die. My body is amazing, and it has been quietly going about the business of adjusting and coping with the various challenges I don't even know I have, such that it hurts when we get things properly aligned again to prevent a snowball effect of other muscle issues.

My body and I have a deal, a good working partnership. Only one of us can flip out at a time. (Not using that in any clinical mental health sense - which is my profession - just colloquial usage.) If my body's muscles are spasming or inherent issues going on, my mind remains calm and works out how best to support my body, then kicks my body into gear to make that happen. If my mind is spinning and overwhelmed, my body informs me we need to go for a walk or do some Feldenkrais, or simply grab my camera and go outside to take pictures as part of my Contemplative Photography practice (or do some forest bathing [shinrin yoku] if available). We are an excellent team.

Yet my body would keep me going even if I paid no attention to it. Might not be as long or as well as I'd like, but it is so adaptable, it would simply keep on going until it physically couldn't anymore. I am constantly humbled and awed by how fragile/strong/responsive/resilient it is.

Now if I could just get it to remember that there is no need to tense up and guard movement after it's been smoothed out, because I practice somatic and proprioceptive awareness virtually all day long nowadays. I love these body-centered reminders of how how incredible the human body is. It helps put many things into perspective for me and renews my drive to keep it functioning as best I can.

Thank you so much for sharing thus with us here. I see you and the light within you. Be well. 🤲🏻❤🤲🏻